New France and New York in the 1690s: an English boy and a French officer, Frontenac's Canada, the Iroquois, and a feud carried across thirty years and two colonies. Parker was Canadian-born, settled in England, sat in Parliament for eighteen years and was knighted; the Canada here is the real one — snowshoes, mission stations, the long war for the fur trade. Fifty-seven plates, from Antoine Rivalz to Edvard Munch, carry the winter forest, the snowbound coast and the battle line through the same northern world the novel fights across.
